Giorgio Morandi
One of the undisputed protagonists of 20th-century Italian painting is Giorgio Morandi, a Bolognese painter who was born in 1890 and died in 1964. Morandi is also considered to be one of the greatest world-famous engravers of the last century. From his youth he showed a talent for art and an aptitude for drawing which at first tended towards figurative art. He spent his life without ever leaving Bologna for any long period, but he developed a deep culture concerning artists of the past and avant-garde artists, from whom he drew inspiration.
His first exhibition was in 1914 at the Hotel Baglioni of Bologna, and on that occasion the influence of Paul Cézanne, an indispensable model for his development, was very evident. The germ of his future artistic style could be glimpsed, based on a reduction of the color range and the accentuation of everyday elements and objects. While he had close contacts with Futurism, his inclination remained closer to the aesthetic ideas of metaphysical painting. This makes Morandi’s painting a means for expressing poetry through the physicality and reality of the world and of things, a quiet, meditative kind of painting which evokes a spiritual other world of contemplation and harmony.
While at the beginning of his career he mainly painted landscapes, into which he inserted few essential elements, from the 1920s on he focused his production on still lifes. He painted the famous bottles and simple vases, re-examining and re-interpreting them, each time modifying their arrangement on the table, producing a whole world of variations with just a few basic objects. Light and shape are reworked and redefined in geometrical proportions, with a constant attention to synthesis and quintessence.
Giorgio Morandi is one of the most important 20th-century Italian artists, and his works are exhibited in the most prestigious public and private collections. Today his works are still sold at over a million euros with peaks up to three million euros, and the average selling prices are constantly on the increase.
